Saturday, May 9, 2015

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at the International Business Times, pondering whether David Cameron is ready to make the huge concessions that will now be necessary if he truly wants to prevent independence. You can read it HERE. (It's also on Yahoo HERE.)

Even by his usual standards, Fraser Nelson has said something utterly outrageous today. He reveals that he's "delighted" the Tories have won an outright majority (there's a surprise), and notes that the SNP with their 56 seats are "technically" entitled to lots of places on select committees (including chairmanships), plus two questions per week at Prime Minister's Questions. But he then adds that they shouldn't actually get those things, and that status in the Commons should be determined by share of the vote rather than seats won.

Dear God. There is nothing "technical" about any of this, Fraser. The most basic principle of how democracy works in the Westminster system is that ONLY SEATS MATTER. If any other principle applied, we wouldn't have a Tory majority government at all - instead we'd have a hung parliament in which the Tories hold little more than one-third of the seats, in line with the rather pathetic 37% of the votes they received on Thursday. If that's what you prefer, by all means let's have it. But what you can't do is have it both ways - if you're prepared to justify absolute Tory rule on the basis of seats, not votes, then the SNP must also get exactly the degree of influence in the Commons that their haul of seats fully entitle them to.

On the subject of PMQs, the case for the SNP group leader having two questions per week is absolutely unanswerable - the Lib Dems were given that right after the 1997 election, in which they won 10 fewer seats than the SNP have now.

* * *

I don't entirely agree with RevStu's assessment that it was the interpretation of the opinion polls that was wrong in this campaign, rather than the polls themselves. The margin of error for any individual poll is 3%, but if the methodology is well-founded, different polls should be fluctuating around an average that is much more accurate than that. The average in the closing stages showed the Tories and Labour in a virtual dead heat, so there's no doubt whatever that we've just seen a polling disaster on the scale of 1992. In fact, the similarities to 1992 are absolutely uncanny - even the parliamentary majority the Tories ended up with is almost the same. The one difference is that the exit poll came out smelling of roses this time, although that's only because it was much closer to being accurate than the regular polls. In different circumstances, it might still have come in for criticism, because its central forecast was for a hung parliament rather than a Tory majority.

I'm not sure if anyone has pointed this out yet, but the pollster that has taken the biggest hit is probably Ashcroft. A lot of people expected his two-question approach to constituency polls to be vindicated by a large number of Liberal Democrat holds in England, but the opposite happened. As it turns out, he would have been much closer to the truth in Lib Dem held seats if he had headlined the results of his first question (asking for general voting intentions) rather than the second (asking for voting intentions that take into account local factors). Needless to say, the notorious Lib Dem 'comfort polls' look even more fantastical than they did prior to Thursday.

Ashcroft fared better in Scotland, but even here he made some howlers - he showed the SNP well ahead in Dumfriesshire, and suggested that the Lib Dems were virtually tied for the lead in Berwickshire.

* * *

Dennis Smith asked on the previous thread for suggestions of who the new Secretary of State for Scotland will be, and wondered if there may not be one at all. I'll be amazed if it's not David Mundell, if only because Cameron will be eager to underline the fact that his government does still have a foothold in Scotland, albeit a tiny one. A blogpost that I wrote in February 2010, with the title 'The most lightweight Cabinet minister ever?', suddenly looks well ahead of its time.

Claim from the Daily Mail :"a majority of Scots actually voted for pro-Union parties on Thursday"

Verdict : LIE. 50.0% of the electorate voted SNP, and a further 1.3% voted for the pro-independence Scottish Green Party, making a grand total of 51.3%. By definition, therefore, only a minority of Scots voted for pro-Union parties.

Of course, it would be perfectly fair to point out that not everyone who voted for the pro-independence parties is a supporter of independence (by the same token, not everyone who voted for the unionist parties is an opponent of independence). But that was not the claim the Mail made.

Friday, May 8, 2015

Just a quick note to let you know that I took part in another of Derek Bateman's podcasts earlier today, to discuss the election result. The other guests were Angela Haggerty of Common Space, journalist Maurice Smith, NUJ Organiser Paul Holleran, and Professor John Robertson. You can listen to the first part HERE, and the second part HERE.

Long-term readers of this blog might remember that on the day after the 2011 SNP landslide, I was too bleary-eyed to write a blogpost, so instead I just allowed the "sheer arithmetical poetry" of the raw numbers to speak for themselves. In the circumstances, I thought it might be an idea to repeat the exercise today.

Result of the 2015 UK general election in Scotland :

SNP 56

Liberal Democrats 1

Labour 1

Conservatives 1

Popular vote :

SNP 50.0%

Labour 24.3%

Conservatives 14.9%

Liberal Democrats 7.5%

UKIP 1.6%

Greens 1.3%

Amidst all the talk of the Labour calamity, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that 14.9% is an all-time low for the Tories as well - their previous record low was 15.6% under William Hague in 2001.

* * *

I was slightly horrified when I turned on the computer a few minutes ago to spot that the Tories had somehow got up to 331 seats across the UK. Officially, that's an overall majority of 12, which is significantly smaller than the 21 that John Major started with in 1992 (and which he eventually lost over the course of the five-year term as a result of by-elections and defections). But the difference is that Sinn Féin had no seats at all in the 1992-97 parliament, compared to the four they have now - none of whom will take their seats. So the de facto Tory majority is a healthier 16. The only scenario that might see a return to a hung parliament over the next couple of years would be a sudden realignment in the party system caused by the EU referendum (ie. if some Tory backbenchers can't stomach Cameron campaigning for Britain to stay in the EU, and march off to UKIP or a completely new party in disgust).

[UPDATE : I can't work out whether the BBC are counting John Bercow as a Tory MP. If they're not, the de facto Tory majority is actually 18 - almost identical to John Major's.]

All the same, this government is going to be significantly weaker than the coalition government, which started life with a very handsome majority of 76. We will see a fair number of tight votes, and the whips in all of the three main parties (of which the SNP are now one) will be kept very busy.

It looks from the rumours emanating from the various counts that the SNP will fall short of the 58 seats forecast by the exit poll, but perhaps not by all that much. The overall battle for power throughout the UK remains on a knife-edge - the exit poll would only have to be overestimating the Tories by 15 or so seats (well within the margin of error) for the SNP to be in a pivotal position in a hung parliament. In that scenario, the Tories would still lead the government, but they would be losing votes in the Commons regularly, and it might be very tempting for them to offer the SNP substantial Home Rule in return for English Votes for English Laws - thus transforming the Tory administration into a majority government on English matters.

If, however, the exit poll is bang-on accurate, the SNP will have limited influence - BUT there will be a clear majority in the Commons for an in/out EU referendum. That obviously opens up the possibility of the one and only event that might lead to Scottish independence in the short-to-medium term - namely British withdrawal from the EU against the wishes of Scottish voters.

Thursday, May 7, 2015

I was watching the UK-wide BBC programme, so I'm making the assumption that the only seat the SNP aren't predicted to win is Orkney & Shetland - hence the "Lib Dem 1". Correct me if I've misunderstood. [UPDATE : Apparently I may have misunderstood - a comment below says it's SNP 58, Labour 1.]

Oh dear. The title was originally going to read "the Poll of Polls still gleaming", because I'd taken on board your requests to calculate a final Poll of Polls update, and was just about the press 'publish'. I then noticed that I had included three polls that shouldn't be there, and excluded five polls that should be. The nerves are jangling so much that I think I'm just going to leave it at that. Suffice to say that the SNP would probably have been in the high 40s (in my incorrect calculation they were on 48.0% and Labour were on 26.2%).

Labour "insiders" have told the Guardian that they expect to hold seats in Glasgow that they really shouldn't be holding - it's obviously impossible to know whether that's the truth, a bluff, or a half-bluff, but please use it as motivation to keep the get-out-the-vote effort going until the very last second at 10pm. In many places you can just turn up, volunteer your services, and you'll be told what to do. (And if anyone wants to leave details of where to go in specific locations, feel free to leave a comment below).

* * *

If I can be permitted a brief moment of self-indulgence, this blog has had 40,421 unique readers in the last month - that's 10,000 higher than in the month leading up to the referendum. Does that mean the election has been bigger than the referendum? Obviously not, but it's amazing how close we've got to a repeat of the same intensity.

Even allowing for the fact that a substantial minority of readers are from far-flung places, I reckon that roughly 1% of the entire population of Scotland has visited Scot Goes Pop at some point in 2015 so far. Not bad for a little blog that started out in 2008 with an average of (literally) three readers per day!

No rest for the wicked today - I've just been one of the guests in an election podcast at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh (which I realised to my mild horror the other day that people were actually buying tickets for!), and once I get home I'll be doing some live-blogging for the IBTimes. Feel free to help me out if you have any polling day anecdotes, or on-the-ground intelligence!

UPDATE : OK, I'm home. The IBTimes live blog is HERE, and I see they've got Duncan Hothersall sending updates as well, so we've got to compete here, guys. This will be competitive live-blogging.

UPDATE II : I've added the concerns raised by Scottish Skier and James about the mistake in the Survation datasets to the live blog. When I next have six months to spare, I'll get a calculator out and try to decide whether the voting intention figures are wrong!

Here's a photo from today's show at the Traverse. As you can see from the black-and-white, it took place in 1924, so Jim Murphy will be a deeply worried man. From left-to-right : the brilliant singer Chrissy Barnacle, myself, journalist Peter Geoghegan, Green candidate Sarah Beattie-Smith (who was presenting), Juliet Swann of the Electoral Reform Society, the playwright/director David Greig (who was also presenting), and the playwright Linda McLean. There's another show at the same venue (but with a different line-up) tonight at 10.30 if you fancy it - tickets are £8, and you can find details HERE.

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Well, so much for the YouGov poll at the weekend being the last before polling day - we've had no fewer than three in the last few hours, although it does seem likely that this Survation poll will be the last one until the exit poll at 10pm tomorrow. It contains something of a curveball, because Survation have decided to headline the results of an additional voting intention question asked using a replica ballot paper, rather than the one asked in the normal way. Consequently, the headline numbers below are not directly comparable with anything that has gone before.Scottish voting intentions for tomorrow's UK general election (Survation, 3rd-6th May) :SNP 45.9%Labour 25.8% Conservatives 15.0%Liberal Democrats 7.1% Greens 2.6% UKIP 2.4%
In line with recent Survation polls, the standard voting intention question produced a somewhat bigger SNP lead than that -

SNP 48.9% (-2.3)Labour 24.8% (-0.8)Conservatives 15.5% (+1.2)Liberal Democrats 5.9% (+0.5)Greens 2.4% (+1.0)UKIP 2.0% (n/c)
In reality, only the results of the standard question are much use to us at the moment. There's no point trying to estimate exactly what the true SNP lead is, because different firms are producing very different numbers. What we can try to nail down is the trend. Two of the three polls today have suggested a slight narrowing of the SNP lead (on the standard question), while the third has suggested a slight increase. The odd one out is Panelbase, and it's noticeable that they started their fieldwork three days earlier than YouGov and two days earlier than Survation, so I suppose it's not impossible that they missed an ultra-late swing to Labour that the other pollsters managed to detect.

The most that can be said is that there's no firm evidence of any movement to Labour, but if it has happened it must be very small.

The Record, who commissioned the Survation poll, are making a song and dance about how the ballot paper version of the question points to a marginally less overwhelming landslide for the SNP. They suggest that this is partly because of people who would otherwise be SNP voters drifting off to 'local heroes' standing for the unionist parties, and partly because of anti-SNP tactical voting. The snag, though, is that the YouGov poll also asked an additional question in an attempt to see if local factors made any difference, and found that the SNP lead actually increased. Doubtless Survation would claim that their approach is superior because they name actual candidates, but nevertheless the evidence is obviously contradictory at this stage.

What does look increasingly likely is that the Liberal Democrat vote has strengthened as the campaign has drawn to a close. The YouGov poll at the weekend suggested that the Lib Dems were doing significantly better than at any point since the referendum, and today's poll from the same firm confirms that result wasn't a fluke. The Panelbase poll has the Lib Dems equalling their post-referendum record high, while the 6% in the standard question from Survation is not a record, but is still above average. This development may pose a problem for the SNP in one or two of the tougher Lib Dem-held seats.

SNP 48%Labour27%Conservatives 14%Liberal Democrats 7%UKIP 2%Greens 1%
These numbers are marginally better for Labour than the three most recent YouGov polls. That doesn't necessarily mean there's been a late recovery for the party - they could just be a touch on the high side in this poll due to normal sampling variation, and that theory is supported by the fact that today's Panelbase poll suggested a further small increase in the SNP lead. However, the Survation poll may make the situation clearer.

UPDATE : The Survation poll is out - full details, plus more analysis of the YouGov result, will appear in a fresh post HERE.

Not the title of an underwhelming romantic comedy starring Mel Gibson, but rather a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at the International Business Times, on the subject of the concessions the SNP are likely to be looking for if they get involved in post-election negotiations from Friday onwards. You can read it HERE. (It's also on Yahoo HERE.)

You might remember that we heard from a couple of people at the weekend that a full-scale Scottish poll from Panelbase was underway. I wondered if it might be an internal poll for the SNP, in which case there was a chance the results would never see the light of day. Thankfully, it turns out to have been commissioned by Wings Over Scotland. It's hugely valuable, because unless we get another surprise poll later today, this is our only opportunity to see what impact on public opinion (if any) there was from the revelation last Thursday night that Miliband might be prepared to help Cameron stay in power in some circumstances. Panelbase's fieldwork started on Friday, and concluded only today.

Scottish voting intentions for the May 2015 UK general election (Panelbase, 1st-6th May) :SNP 48% (n/c)Labour 26% (-1)Conservatives 14% (-2)Liberal Democrats 5% (+1)UKIP 3% (n/c)Greens 2 (n/c)
It looks as if there has been little or no change as a result of the events of Thursday. The 1% increase in the SNP lead is obviously well within the margin of error, although it's enough to break yet another record. As I used to say during the referendum campaign, even the smallest of changes is potentially of interest if it takes a pollster outside its previous 'normal range'. However, this result is fully consistent with the trend we saw from YouGov at the weekend - the most plausible narrative is that there was a second telling SNP surge a few weeks ago, and that the position has remained relatively stable since then.

Although there may be no disagreement between pollsters over the trend, what we don't have is agreement on the extent of the SNP's lead. Believe it or not, Panelbase remain the most Labour-friendly of all the pollsters that have been active in this campaign (with the exception of ICM, who haven't reported for quite a while). The 22 point lead in this poll is well short of the 32-34 point leads reported most recently by the two most SNP-friendly firms, TNS and Ipsos-Mori. The divergence we're seeing between the firms is considerably bigger than anything that is going on at Britain-wide level - if that wasn't the case, we might be going to bed tonight not having a clue whether to expect a Conservative majority government, a Labour majority government or a hung parliament.

Given that even the Panelbase result is projected to give the SNP no fewer than 53 seats out of 59, does it even matter which firm is closest to the truth? Of course it does. There could be a very late swing back to Labour. There could be very heavy tactical voting. There could be a 1992-style (or Israeli-style) polling disaster in which all firms turn out to have overestimated one party, and underestimated another. If any of these things are true, the SNP could end up winning significantly fewer seats if Panelbase is nearest the mark. But if Ipsos-Mori turns out to be the best performer, the SNP are already so far out of sight that the result is effectively assured.

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Bella Caledonia has just helpfully directed me to a list of Scottish Westminster seats, sorted by referendum result. I haven't seen anything like that before, and to be perfectly honest I'm not sure whether all of the results are definitive. Because the referendum count was done on a local authority basis, some of them may be notional results (ie. intelligent estimates). However, if we can assume they're probably fairly accurate, they make for fascinating reading. Here's what leaps out at me -

1) Fifteen out of fifty-nine constituencies voted Yes - more than a quarter. Our unionist friends used to love nothing better than a really good gloat about how only four out of thirty-two local authorities voted Yes, but that was always grossly misleading, due to two of the Yes-voting authorities being so enormous.

2) The highest Yes vote was not, as you would think, in one of the Dundee seats, but instead in Glasgow South. Amusingly, that's the seat being defended for Labour by über-Blairite Tom Harris. It's little wonder that our dear old pal "Bomber Admin" may soon be seeking a more constructive form of employment.

3) Glenrothes is sometimes cited as an example of a constituency that Labour might just hold, but these figures would suggest otherwise. It was one of the fifteen Yes seats (albeit only very narrowly).

4) Slightly to my surprise, Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey voted Yes fairly decisively. I knew Inverness was a Yes city, but I had thought perhaps the rural parts of the seat tipped the balance in favour of No. To stick with a recurring theme, Danny Alexander is toast.

5) Gordon isn't quite the hard-core No area it's sometimes portrayed as - the Yes vote there was 41.7%. So Alex Salmond was scarcely defying gravity when he got 43% of the vote in the January constituency poll from Ashcroft. There's no particular reason to think his support will have dipped since then, so if the Liberal Democrats seriously believe their spin about being on the brink of victory, the tactical voting in their favour is going to have to be on an industrial scale. They were on just 26% in the Ashcroft poll, and unlike in so many other Lib Dem-seats, their candidate doesn't have a personal vote to fall back on.

6) The most No-heavy seat in the country was Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, where Yes only received 32.9% of the vote. But ironically, if Ashcroft is to be believed, that vote share might conceivably be enough to win the seat for the SNP. The reason is that the unionist vote is split down the middle between the Tories and the Lib Dems, and it will be virtually impossible for anyone to work out which is the more promising anti-SNP tactical option.

With the Bank Holiday weekend over, YouGov have finally published their Scottish datasets after a long delay. Among the supplementary questions, the most eye-catching finding is on the subject of leadership -

Do you think Nicola Sturgeon is doing well or badly as First Minister?

Well: 75% (+7)
Badly: 19% (-7)

NET RATING: +56

Do you think that Jim Murphy is doing well or badly as leader of the Scottish Labour party?

Well: 27% (-5)
Badly: 62% (+8)

NET RATING: -35

The gap between the net ratings of the two leaders is now a mind-boggling 91 points, which is 27 points bigger than in the last YouGov poll.

Whatever the die-hard Murphy fans in the media may believe, it is utterly inconceivable that any leader with these ratings could make a case for remaining in harness if he loses his parliamentary seat on Thursday. And even if he clings on in East Renfrewshire courtesy of tactical votes from Tory supporters, there will still be a huge question mark over his position. It's not good enough to pretend that his personal popularity is being dragged down by Labour's generic woes - Ruth Davidson has proved that it is perfectly possible to be associated with a toxic brand, and yet still be held in reasonably high esteem by the public.

It's obviously impossible to quantify exactly how much of a drag the Murphy Factor is on Labour's support, but to persist with the belief that he is (or will miraculously become) a net positive for the party is utterly delusional.

The fieldwork for this poll was conducted between Wednesday and Friday, so as I suspected it mostly predates the Question Time leaders' special on Thursday night, and Miliband's indication that he would be willing to put Cameron back in power in some circumstances. So we're not much closer to knowing what the impact of that development was, other than the little clues provided by Scottish subsamples in GB-wide polls. Today's YouGov subsample is : SNP 44%, Labour 26%, Conservatives 18%, Liberal Democrats 10%, Greens 2%. Yesterday's result was a bit closer, but I haven't spotted anything out of the ordinary since Thursday.

* * *

I recently took part in a short interview for an online Al Jazeera article about the general election - you can read it HERE.

A few hours ago, ICM released a constituency poll from Sheffield Hallam, suggesting that Nick Clegg has a 7% lead over his Labour opponent. On the face of it, this contradicts a string of Ashcroft polls in the same seat, the most recent of which gave Labour a slender 1% advantage. It's being widely assumed that the divergence can be explained by ICM providing respondents with the names of the leading candidates, something which Ashcroft never does. The Lib Dems are obviously keen to spin this as meaning that the Ashcroft polls are unreliable in general, including the ones that have shown them on course to lose seats in Scotland.

That may sound plausible, but there are a number of caveats. First of all, it's not actually clear that the ICM and Ashcroft polls are even in disagreement. The two results are within the margin of error of each other, and it's particularly noticeable that ICM have Labour fractionally ahead before applying the turnout filter and the 'spiral of silence' adjustment. Secondly, it can't automatically be assumed that naming the candidates down the phone produces a more accurate result. That certainly doesn't replicate the polling booth experience, because while some voters may scan the ballot paper carefully for the names of the candidates, others will just quickly look for the party emblems before marking their cross.

Most importantly, the Lib Dems mustn't get away with claiming that their 'comfort polling' - including the poll purporting to show Jo Swinson narrowly ahead of the SNP in East Dunbartonshire - is now vindicated simply because it names the candidates. The main reason those polls have no credibility is that they use a question sequence designed to get respondents thinking positively about the local Lib Dem MP just before they are asked the voting intention question. Needless to say, ICM haven't done anything as silly as that.

But if we assume for the sake of argument that the ICM poll in Sheffield is a useful guide to how much Ashcroft may be underestimating the Lib Dem incumbency bonus, what does that mean for the SNP's prospects in Lib Dem-held seats north of the border? Ashcroft has polled seven such seats, including six in which the SNP have emerged as the main challengers. In those six, the smallest SNP lead he's found is 11% in East Dunbartonshire. The difference between the Ashcroft and ICM polls in Sheffield is equivalent to a 4% swing - so if the same applies in Scotland, the SNP would still be ahead in all six seats. Admittedly, it would be a close run thing in a couple of them - but not in Inverness. Unless Danny Alexander turns out to have a bigger personal vote than Nelson Mandela, he really is toast.

Monday, May 4, 2015

One thing we learned during the referendum campaign is that voters in England don't have particularly well-developed views on Scottish independence, and that their instinctive reactions when asked about the subject contain a mass of contradictions. For example, they readily buy into the fiction that Scotland is "subsidised" by the rest of the UK, and yet they also believe that the rest of the UK would be worse off if Scotland became independent. How so, if the "subsidy" would no longer be paid?

A new YouGov poll for the Economist finds once again that far more voters think independence would be a bad thing for the rest of the UK than think it would be a good thing. So, surely, you'd imagine, it would be well worth paying just £1 a year to prevent that "bad thing" from happening? Er, apparently not.

Suppose that you had to pay to keep Scotland in the United Kingdom. How much would you pay? (Respondents in England & Wales only) :

More than £500 a year : 1%Between £250 and £500 a year : 2%Between £1 and £250 a year : 7%NOTHING AT ALL : 70%I would pay money FOR an independent Scotland : 6%

So that's a grand total of 76% who would either refuse to pay even £1, or would be willing to fork out for us to "leave" (as the jargon goes). Hmmm. This "we want you to stay" rhetoric is all very well, but if people aren't even prepared to pay half the price of a lottery ticket once per year to make it happen, clearly the sentiment doesn't run as deep as we're led to believe.

By the way, the equivalent grand total in Scotland is only 64% - but that includes a much higher figure of 26% who would pay money to get Scotland out of the UK.

It's always interesting to look out for any divergence in opinion between Scotland and the rest of the UK, and possibly the most significant example in this poll is...

Which of these outcomes from the general election do you think would be more likely to lead to Scottish independence at some point in the future?

Respondents in Scotland :

A Conservative-led government with David Cameron as Prime Minister : 32%A Labour-led government with Ed Miliband as Prime Minister : 13%Respondents in England & Wales : A Conservative-led government with David Cameron as Prime Minister : 18%A Labour-led government with Ed Miliband as Prime Minister : 20%

In truth, both Cameron and Miliband are acting in a way that's likely to increase support for independence, but there's no getting away from it - Cameron is the one who is directly saying "Vote Conservative to ensure that the result of the election in Scotland has no impact whatever on British affairs". It would be interesting to sit down with some of the voters south of the border who think that is somehow a strategy for reducing support for independence, and ask them to explain their reasoning.

Intriguingly, though, there is broad agreement among Scottish and English voters on the overall likelihood of independence -

Do you think that Scotland will or will not be an independent country in 20 years’ time?Respondents in Scotland :Will : 52%Will not : 39%Respondents in England & Wales : Will : 47%Will not : 34%

So Jim Murphy said it again on tonight's leaders' debate - Labour will vote against a Tory Queen's Speech under all circumstances. It is almost impossible to square that with Ed Miliband's claim on Thursday that there are circumstances in which he would refrain from taking office in order to avoid working with the SNP. I suppose technically there is nothing to prevent Labour from voting the Tories down and then declining to form a government themselves, but the direct outcome of that would be a second election within weeks (by July at the latest). They would be absolutely crucified for acting so irresponsibly, and we can safely assume it won't happen. Essentially, either Murphy or Miliband is lying to us. As ever in these situations, it's hard not to conclude that it must be Murphy.

If there's one thing that I find even more irritating than Jim Murphy's mannerisms, it's the grotesque spectacle of a Scottish Tory innocently claiming that her party must be opposed to proportional representation for principled reasons, because first-past-the-post is such a rotten system for them. Oh yeah, so that's why you had absolute power in Scotland between 1979 and 1997, without ever having got more than 31% of the vote? Hint : it's only a bad system for you if it doesn't work massively in your favour at UK-wide level. I think it's probably fair to say that quite a few Scottish Tories would have undergone a Damascene conversion on the electoral system if Scotland had voted Yes last year.

It's also, of course, complete garbage for Ruth Davidson to claim that Scotland voted heavily against electoral reform in the 2011 referendum. That's like claiming that a death row prisoner in America who is forced to choose the method of his own execution has made a decision not to live. People certainly voted against AV for incredibly stupid reasons, and they probably didn't understand the system they were voting against, but there was still a widespread instinctive appreciation that the option being put before the country was nothing remotely like the Holy Grail that the Liberals and the SDP used to fight so passionately for.

By the way, is it just me, or has the unionist media given up to such an extent that they can't even be bothered trying to spin this debate as "another win for Jim Murphy"?

* * *

It's possible that we may have at least one more full-scale Scottish poll to come before polling day - I was emailed within the last hour by someone who was polled by Panelbase this morning, and it seemed to be a Scottish poll. If so, I would guess it can't have been commissioned by Panelbase's usual newspaper client, because obviously the Sunday Times wouldn't be able to publish until after the election. So the client could be an alternative media outlet (such as Wings), or the SNP. If the latter, we may only see the results if it's tactically advantageous to release them.

Sunday, May 3, 2015

There's not a huge amount more I can say about the new YouGov poll, because unlike John Curtice I haven't had the advantage of seeing the datasets - and given that this is a Bank Holiday weekend, it's not completely impossible they might not be published until Tuesday. However, Curtice's own article does reveal a few interesting titbits. Firstly, the independence question was asked again -

Should Scotland be an independent country?Yes 47% (-1)No 53% (+1)
This is more likely to be margin of error 'noise' than a genuine easing down of support for independence. It looks to me as if the Yes vote with YouGov has been hovering around the 48% mark since the big methodological change a few months ago. Similarly with Survation, it's been hovering around the 49% mark - sometimes a little higher, sometimes a little lower, but it was bang on 49% in the most recent poll a few days ago. Bear in mind that both firms now weight by recalled referendum vote, so we can be fairly sure that the Yes share has genuinely increased from the 45% recorded on September 18th. This also means that poll results now are not directly comparable with pre-referendum poll results, so the people (and unfortunately they do exist) who claim that "YouGov's figures are much the same as before referendum day, and look what happened then" are barking up the wrong tree.

The percentage of respondents who want another independence referendum within ten years has slipped slightly from 40% last month to 36% now. That figure is obviously much lower than the 59% who said the same thing in the Survation poll, but that's largely because of different methodology. Survation don't seem to offer a Don't Know option on that question - so every respondent is forced to give an opinion. More importantly, they also offer a far more realistic range of options than YouGov, with the two extremes being that a referendum should never take place, and that there should be another referendum within two years (there's also an option of within five years). In YouGov's case, the option of a referendum within ten years IS one of the two extremes, and seems to be presented to respondents last. Other than Don't Know, the six options are "never", "not for at least 50 years", "not for at least 25 years", "not for at least 15 years", "not for at least 10 years" or "within 10 years". The unspoken message being sent to respondents is that you're on the fringes if you select the last option - and the fact that 36% still did so speaks volumes. Even more significantly, a combined total of 49% selected one of the last two options, which clearly implies there should be a referendum within 15 years (ie. less than the fabled 'generation') -

Less than fifteen years : 49% (-2)More than fifteen years : 44% (n/c)
By the way, a mere 16% say there should never be another referendum.
Encouragingly, there is now an absolute majority of respondents who think that, regardless of their own preference, there will be another referendum within ten years. Clearly, Jim Murphy's sterling efforts in talking up the prospect of that happening is helping to normalise the idea. Thanks, Jim!

There probably WILL be another referendum within ten years : 54% (+4)There probably WON'T be another referendum within ten years : 33% (-4)
Curtice also implies that roughly half of the Lib Dems' 7% support is made up of tactical voters. This may be a cause for concern for the SNP, because in most cases that will presumably be anti-SNP tactical voting. The only likely exception is in Berwickshire, Roxburgh & Selkirk, where some voters may still (wrongly) assume that the Lib Dems are the best hope of keeping the Tories out. It's noted by Curtice that many people voting tactically this time did the same thing in 2010, so in a sense the phenomenon is already 'factored in' to the baseline numbers - but that may not be much comfort to the SNP in Lib Dem-held seats. There won't have been many Tories voting Lib Dem to keep the SNP out five years ago - of if there were, they were behaving totally irrationally.

I still haven't been able to track down the fieldwork dates for the poll, although it seems to have concluded on Friday, which presumably means that only a small proportion of interviews took place after Miliband revealed on Thursday night that he might be prepared to help Cameron stay in office.